Sunday, March 8, 2020

What do we want - A History of Dogmatism or A History of Sustainability (at the backdrop of COVID Outbreak)?

While the world is undergoing through a struggle and fight against a deadly virus COVID, it has to be remembered that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The struggles right now all across the world and in this Anthropocene are far too many - a) Struggle between validation and legitimacy, b) Struggle between winning and understanding, c) Struggle between the periphery of truth and legitimacy of politics, d) Struggle between unmasking of power and the hardship of creating solutions going beyond the rhetoric of proving and disproving everything by a genealogy of hypocrisy, power relations, e) Struggle between class struggle dogmas and enabling a discussion to win over dogmas and create solutions.

Beyond all of this, the humanity has created a struggle for the self existence through a claustrophobia of self destructive, perpetual, multiplicity of truth. Going beyond these possibilities of the struggle of existence, the civilization on the Earth is also facing a struggle between human kind, peace, mutual coexistence with nature, aliens, future machine and humanoid civilization.

Challenges of all the listed struggles are too many. This precisely requires a breaking away from all dogmatic pedagogies from any past, existing scientific disciplines and seek for the new truth. In such truth seeking, the past has to  be remembered. But there also has to be a delicate balance in how much of the past should be remembered and how much should be delved upon and over pondered to create new solutions for a new future. If this is not done, then I wonder whether we will really be able to create a history of sustainability.

It is an imperative at this juncture, therefore to start a truth seeking through validation going beyond too much of the dogmatism of being a critique, an argumentative, a debating and a skeptic being. At the core of all this, what it has done to the humanity and society at large is that - "We have converted ourselves constantly into a race of winning something over the other and that itself to me is being dogmatic". The need of the hour is therefore not to win a debate, an argument, a critique, or be a skeptical and create a new claustrophobia of dogmatism within a world which is already plagued with too many challenges.

The harbinger of peace making process needs to be practiced. It  requires the journey of truth seeking which can then also lead to the self - defeating question of - "What is the truth that we are seeking for?"
These leads to questions of - "What are the truths of the history of human civilization - Is it only a history of oppression, class conflicts, one winning over the other and fighting which has led to this situation or - Is it also a history of mutual coexistence, a fight against dogmatism, peaceful coexistence?" 

So, the prevailing question is which truth is being demanded by the society, institutions and which path do we want to follow?  In the past, too much of critique, debate, dogmatist thinking of class oppression by observing one reality definitely has exposed us to some realities - But the pertinent question is - In that truth seeking have we enabled a culture of winning or of practising peace making?

Isn't it so, that the culture of truth seeking in a way got disrupted, validation ended and then we have knowingly and unknowingly moved towards a culture of legitimizing a dogma, a hypocrisy. Well, it is actually an easy task. This is because, hypocrisy is natural, instinctive and banal at the same time. But a soulful search for truth should also move towards and then beyond such a banality and establish the new norms of validation of truth which are coexisting in a culture of complexity by understanding - "What is the value of such a truth?"

 The world needs it quickly, by going beyond the establishment of any dogma to immediately overcome the struggles mentioned as above. Otherwise, we will only write a history of dogma for the world and mother Earth and not a history of sustainability both for nature, humanity and civilization. The future will answer the course of such a history!